Month: February 2012

When you create a custom SL shader in 3Delight it’ll create a automatically create a shader which looks like this in Maya. Now the following UI doesn’t look very useful – the names we’ve called our variables vary in how descriptive they are – which isn’t very useful if others are going to be using this shader

This is based off a shader which looks like this the following SL code.

This will create a shader that looks like this. The hint will be displayed either in the Maya status line or as a tool-tip if you hover the cursor over the UI element.

You can place the #pragma lines anywhere in your SL file, to see them you will need to re-compile the shader and then reload the shader inside Maya by right clicking on the shader, selecting “reload shader” and then selecting the shader in either the Assignment Panel or the Outliner.

The first function sRGB_decode_f does the majority of the work, the second function sRGB_decode uses that in order to operate on an input colour. To use this in SL we would use something along the lines of this. The first line here creates a colour variable with a mid-grey value in sRGB space. The second line converts that colour into a linear colour.

Quite often in CG when working with multiple passes – you want to do different things depending on what type of pass your rendering – the two more common ways to do this are to either create two different shaders and change the assignment for each pass or to write a shader which is able to figure out what type of pass it is and act appropriately.

For example in a bake pass you typically want to bake out attributes which aren’t dependant on the position or direction of the camera – this includes things like diffuse/ambient shading, subsurface scattering and ambient occlusion data – which can all be baked out and reused on objects. Only when the position and direction of the objects or lights changes does the scene need to be rebaked.

In order to control this in 3Delight you can use the RiMel commands to setup custom RIB commands which can be read by your shaders. The following MEL commands are placed inside a PreWorldMEL attribute on the render pass itself.

By default 3Delight also exports out the name of the render pass to an attribute called delight_renderpass_name – this is name of your render pass inside Maya. You can query that name using the following RSL. Obviously using this method highly depends on what you call your passes – the following shading code wouldn’t work if the render pass was called anything other than “bake” – for example if you wanted to do multiple bake passes for within the same scene like separating out animated bakes (which require multiple frames) from static bakes (things which don’t move which can be stored in one frame).

The result of which would be 0.5^2.2 = 0.217637641. To correct a colour input, you would need a function like so. c is our colour input and f is the gamma value to use. The major difference here is the use of setcomp in order to operate on each colour channel individually.

Note that Renderman is smart enough to recognise that although we have two functions with the same name called “gammacorrect” – they are returning two different types of data – one being a floating point number the other being a colour. As long as the variable you are passing the data into – in this case “myColour” – is of the correct type, it’ll know what to do with it.